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Warning:

This post may contain more salty language than usual. If you’re easily offended, click out now. I will try my best to contain myself but can’t make any guarantees.

Let’s talk about fucking Uber versus the taxi industry again, shall we? As if there’s nothing else more important to deal with other than what should be, arguably, the 4th best choice in getting around the city. Fuck.

Like I have written, I don’t know, 8 or 10 times previously, I could give a fuck about this issue in terms of policy or technology or whatever. I am in the fortunate position of having a multitude of choices at my disposal in terms of mobility. Paying somebody money to drive me around in their automobile falls pretty much way down to the bottom of the list. It is either out of sheer necessity or absolute laziness that I occasionally wind up in a cab. An after-thought or very pre-planned forethought before an early morning trip to the airport, say.

I could only wish taxis played as incidental a factor in everyone else’s life as it does mine.

But alas. It doesn’t. Evidently, as somehow I keep winding up talking about something I don’t really fucking care about.

So it was with Wednesday’s taxi protest which shut traffic in parts of the city down to a dead crawl. Drivers buzzed in and out of City Hall during the first day of city council’s December meeting. They threw what might be called a spanner in the works if I were writing 70 years ago for a British publication.

They came and fucked things up.

I’m not going to get into the reasons why other than the easy summary that cab drivers came to protest the lack of any serious crackdown on the illegal Uber operations going on in the city. Their sense is the city’s dragging its heels while coming up with new regulations to adjust to the 21st-century reality of what lots of people are mistakenly calling the “ridesharing” entity Uber which has rolled into town flouting a by-law or two. While indulging in what the taxi industry views as rather lax enforcement, the city’s helping to threaten a lot of peoples’ livelihoods which, for many, isn’t much of a livelihood to start with.

That’s a whole other fucking bottle of wax.

So cabbies took to the streets, fucked things up here and there, and didn’t some peoples’ noses get out of joint? Pretty much, How dare they! How Dare They!! Postmedia’s Matt Gurney vowed never again to use a Toronto taxicab. Oh, how will the industry survive such a blow?

By inconveniencing and annoying and generally pissing of so many people with their protest, it was deemed that taxi drivers lost the PR battle. Lose the PR battle, I guess such conventional wisdom goes, you’ve lost the PR war. Lose the PR war and…Oh, who fucking knows?!

Fuck you people and your fucking PR battles. Fuck winning your hearts and minds! Fuck Matt Gurney. Fuck everybody who’s ever had a bad cab ride and now hails Uber as some sort of little guy conquering hero. And fuck every one of you who can’t withstand the inconvenience of some mild civil disobedience thrown your way.

Nobody burned down your fucking house, did they? I’d like to burn down your fucking house right now. Nobody burned down your fucking house. So stop your fucking whining.

(I warned you I was going to swear a lot, didn’t I? I wasn’t lying. If you want more nuanced views about this ongoing civic disruption, let’s call it, give a read if you haven’t already of Desmond Cole’s Toronto Star article yesterday or @pangmeli’s Storify take.)

Look, nobody but nobody except for the exceptionally vested interested thinks the livery system here in Toronto isn’t seriously fucked. It has been for a while now despite regular attempts (some well-intended, others less so) to fix the problems. Many of the solutions and the problems both have proven sticky, gumming up the works and gooily pulling in more attempted fixes until finally what we have is something of a clusterfuck pile on.

But here’s the thing, if you were so concerned about the state of the taxi industry, if it so negatively impacted your life with its terrifying rides, smelly drivers and refusal to accept anything but cash as payment, why not do something about it? Why not demand reform? Why not hold your councillor politically responsible if they did not contribute meaningfully to changing the industry? Why not organize a boycott?

Instead, you mope around, bitching about how badly you’re treated when you’re getting driven around the city, how much it costs you as if there wasn’t any other possible alternative for getting from point A to point B, until Uber suddenly appears to do your fighting for you. Illegally, it turns out. Defiantly so. But hey, what disruptive technology doesn’t skirt the rules, you rationalize. You can’t regulate the future, baby. Adapt or die. The customer’s always right, amirite?

It’s lazy democracy, is what it is. An endorsement of lawlessness for the sake of a few bucks and a smooth ride. But when somebody steps outside the bounds of the law and gets in the way of that ride, delays your forward progress? Anarchy. Outrageous. An epic PR fail.

We deserve a few more protests like we saw on Wednesday. Toughen us up. Shake our priorities around a little. Move us on beyond thinking just about how we can get around the city in the optimum of comfort at the lowest price possible.

Really not sure how preserving the current (exploitational, racist, unsafe, rent-seeking) status quo became the progressive cause du jour except that there seems to be nothing that turns off the left’s critical faculties like the appearance of a large profit-seeking corporation.

Like, did we all forget the status quo is so racist the city was brought to the Human Rights Tribunal over taxi licenses pre-Uber? On public safety, do we all remember the city’s honour system when it came to putting violent felons in cars with lone women? [http://www.metronews.ca/news/toronto/2013/02/06/assault-drunk-driving-death-threats-the-taxi-drivers-toronto-cant-get-off-the-road.html] That Beck *bragged* about its success in killing off Hailo, the only pre-Uber alternative (that, incidentally, drivers preferred because it made calls more transparent.)

How about the fact that drivers and plate-owners colluded at council earlier this year to kill the most tepid reforms imaginable?

Someone show me a path to a fair, well-regulated system that includes a tamed Uber without destroying the current plate-owner’s oligopoly and I’ll sign up. From where I sit, none of that is possible so long as progressives are going to the wall for the status quo.